Robert Penn Warren

An extremely important 20th-century literary figure in the United States, Robert Penn Warren was a poet, novelist, and critic, associated with various “schools” or movements throughout his life, including the “New Critics,” the Southern Agrarians, and the Fugitives (the latter two being important in the development of Southern letters in the beginning of the 1900s). Born in Kentucky and educated, as an undergraduate, at Vanderbilt, Robert Penn Warren also studied at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Warren’s most famous (and Pulitzer-Prize-winning) novel is All the King’s Men—it has earned a place on numerous lists of the greatest American novels of the past century—and he won two Pulitzers for his poetry, making him the lone writer to do so in both genres. Warren was named the US Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (to the Library of Congress) on two separate occasions (in the ‘40s and the ‘80s). Warren died in Vermont at the age of 84.